The Shag Harbour crash happened at the
same time that the so-called Condon Committee UFO investigation was underway. A
summary of the case was provided in the final report as "Case 34, North
Atlantic, Fall 1967." It was stated that their investigation consisted of
a few phone calls to sources in the area. The concluding remarks were, "No
further investigation by the project was considered justifiable, particularly
in view of the immediate and thorough search that had been carried out by the
RCMP and the Maritime Command."
After noting that no aircraft had been
reported missing, no alternative explanation was offered. The case is therefore
considered one of the unsolved ones in the Condon Report.
The Shag Harbour crash got extensive
front page coverage in the normally conservative Halifax Chronicle-Herald. The
paper ran a headline story on October 7 titled, "Could Be Something
Concrete in Shag Harbor UFO — RCAF." (picture above) The article including
witness descriptions of the object and crash, the search and rescue effort, and
the current Navy search. It also mentioned UFO reports that immediately
preceded the crash, including one from a woman in Halifax around 10:00 p.m.
STOPPED HERE AT UFO VIII
Another of these witnesses was Chris
Styles, age 12, who says he came within 100 feet of the object. The sighting
left a deep impression on Styles, who 26 years later was to resurrect the Shag
Harbour case and become its principal investigator. Don Ledger, another Nova
Scotia resident and an aviation expert, would later join Styles.
The Chronicle-Herald ran another story
on October 9 titled "UFO Search Called Off," stating that Canadian
Forces Maritime Command had ended "an intensive undersea search for the
mysterious unidentified flying object that disappeared into the ocean here
Wednesday night." As to what was found, Maritime Command stated, "Not
a trace... not a clue... not a bit of anything." The story of the search
being called off for the "mysterious" "dark object" was
also carried by the Canadian Press in some other Canadian newspapers.
On October 12, the Chronicle-Herald
ran a story of another sighting of a seemingly identical UFO departing the area
the night of October 11, exactly one week after the initial crash. The report
came from Lockland Cameron, Woods Harbour, only about one half mile north of
the first sighting (see map above). Cameron said that he, his family, and
relatives had all witnessed the object. Their attention was initially drawn by
interference on the TV screen around 10 p.m. Cameron went outside to
investigate and noticed six bright red lights, about 55 to 60 feet length, at
an altitude of between 500 to 600 feet, and about three quarters of a mile off
shore. It sat in a stationary position for 7 or 8 minutes and then disappeared.
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
When it reappeared, only four orange
lights were showing and seemed to be at a 35 degree angle. An hour later, a
string of yellow lights appeared rapidly departing to the northeast. The RCMP
investigated and found Cameron to be "sober and sincere."
On October 13, there was a brief
mention of the unexpected arrival of a large barge at Shelburne, supposedly for
repair, carrying an "atomic furnace." This would perhaps provide some
weak corroboration of the previously mentioned witness story of a barge being
brought in for retrieval at Shelburne, with a cover story being given for its
presence there.
The story about the barge also appeared
on October 12 in the Shelburne Coast Guard, a weekly newspaper. The headline
read, "U.S. Barge at Shelburne with Atomic Furnaces." The story
claimed that a barge carrying "two huge atomic furnaces" from
Philadelphia to Rochester, N.Y., had to put into Shelburne for repairs on
October 6 after springing a leak and taking on water.
On October 14, the Chronicle-Herald
ran a final editorial on the incident. It stated that "numbers of people
have described similar objects on at least two occasions. They are agreed upon
such essentials as lights, length of the object or objects, and its speed. In
the second, there was some physical evidence – that yellowish foam discovered
by searchers – which gives yet more credibility to the sightings. Imagination
and or natural phenomena seem to be the weakest, not strongest, of
explanations. It has been a tough week for skeptics."
It has worked with landmines. Can a
conscience-stricken world now pull off the same trick with cluster munitions? These
blast an area with bomblets: handy in the heat of war, but often leaving a
lethal legacy of unexploded ordnance afterwards. Campaigners say that by far
the majority of casualties are civilians.
Now 100-plus countries are meeting in
Dublin, hoping to follow up the success of the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty, signed by
155 governments. The aim is to produce a draft treaty by May 30th, for signing
in December. “A year and a half ago I never would have thought we'd have been
here at this point,” says Bonnie Docherty, a researcher for Human Rights Watch
(HRW), which has been campaigning hard for the ban. During fighting in Lebanon
in 2006, she says, Israel delivered 4m cluster submunitions. As many as a
quarter failed to go off.
The first snag is that countries that
mainly make or use cluster weapons (China, Israel, Pakistan and Russia, as well
as America) are not part of the Dublin talks. America's diplomat for the issue,
Richard Kidd, says UN talks on conventional arms are a better venue. But that
process has been in stalemate for six years.
Nonetheless, campaigners think the
treaty will reduce and stigmatise the use of cluster munitions. Even states
that did not sign the landmine treaty, points out Ms Docherty, have mostly
ended up complying with it. Companies that produce cluster munitions risk
investors' wrath: in March, at the Irish government's request, the National
Pension Reserve Fund sold €23m ($36m) of shares in seven arms companies that
produce the weapons.
Such pressure works only in some
countries. Turkey and Pakistan signed an agreement this February to produce
cluster munitions. Textron, an American arms company, says the three countries
that have bought its new “sensor-fused weapons”, and the 17 that may, are
unlikely to sign the treaty.
Another snag is defining what a
cluster munition is. Most parties agree that the crude weapons designed in the
cold war to attack tank columns and troop formations can be banned. But
Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland all want
exemptions for sophisticated weapons with low failure rates or small numbers of
submunitions.
Smart weapons of the kind produced by
Textron, for example, are programmed to hit vehicle targets. If they miss, they
are inert: unlike old-style weapons, they won't go off when prodded with a
stick. The failure rate in tests is less than 1%. Does that make them
acceptable from a humanitarian point of view? Not necessarily. The M85 used by
Israel in Lebanon supposedly had a failure rate of 1%; reality on the
battlefield proved closer to 10%.
Peter Herby, a top official dealing
with the issue at the International Committee of the Red Cross, a Swiss-based
do-gooding outfit, says exceptions should be particular not specific, depending
on reliability, accuracy and the number of sub-munitions in each weapons
system.
The third snag is that 76 countries
have stockpiles of cluster munitions. HRW reckons the number of bomblets runs
into the billions. Signatories will have to destroy these weapons, not store or
sell them. That is a hazardous, messy and costly business, requiring scarce
skills. Dealing with Britain's 3,650 BL-775 cluster munitions may use up to
eight years' worth of the £30m ($65m) annual budget for disarmament. Some
states want lengthy transition periods too. Places like Laos, whose territory
is still littered with munitions from the hot wars in Indochina, will have
difficulty meeting the five-year target for clearing up unexploded ordnance,
let alone finding money to pay for it.
A final question is whether the treaty
will allow countries that have signed it to continue military co-operation with
those that haven't. That is a pressing issue for America's NATO allies. Yet the
campaigners are optimistic these loose ends will be tied up, or at least
fudged. “Most old cold-war-style cluster munitions will be eliminated, but it's
a matter of where you draw the lines. Wherever you draw them, I think 90-95% of
existing stocks will fall below it. That's really good,” says Mr Herby.
When the prehistoric Mimbres Indians
of New Mexico looked at the moon, they saw in its surface shading not the ''man
in the moon'' but a ''rabbit in the moon.'' For them, as for other early
Meso-American people, the rabbit came to symbolize the moon in their religion
and art.
When the prehistoric Mimbres Indians
of New Mexico looked at the moon, they saw in its surface shading not the ''man
in the moon'' but a ''rabbit in the moon.'' For them, as for other early
Meso-American people, the rabbit came to symbolize the moon in their religion
and art.
On the morning of July 5, 1054, the
Mimbres Indians arose to find a bright new object shining in the Eastern sky,
close to the crescent moon. The object remained visible in daylight for many
days. One observer recorded the strange apparition with a black and white
painting of a rabbit curled into a crescent shape with a small sunburst at the
tip of one foot.
And so the Indians of the Southwestern
United States left what archeologists and astronomers call the most unambiguous
evidence ever found that people in the Western Hemisphere observed with awe and
some sophistication the exploding star, or supernova, that created the Crab
nebula. The ethereal light of the spreading nebula, now visible by telescope in
the constellation Taurus, is the best-known remnant of a recorded supernova.
Dr. R. Robert Robbins, an astronomer
at the University of Texas at Austin, said a Mimbres bowl decorated with the
painting is ''the most certain record of the supernova that has ever been
discovered outside China and Japan.'' Of even more importance, he said, it
provides new insights about the level of astronomical accomplishment of North
American Indians, who have been overshadowed by the more advanced Aztec and
Maya civilizations to the south.
Astrologers to the Emperor of China
left documents of the sudden appearance of a bright object in the sky on July
5, 1054, and how it was visible in daylight for 23 days. Astronomers early this
century determined that the descriptions fit the Crab nebula.
The first indication that American
Indians may have made a pictographic record of the phenomenon emerged in the
last decade or so. Rock art dated at about the 11th century was found in
several states that appears to depict a stellar object associated with a
crescent moon.
Dr. John C. Brandt, an astronomer at
the University of Colorado, said the Mimbres artifact ''greatly strengthened''
his earlier interpretation of the rock art as depictions of the Crab nebula
supernova.
''It is more and more likely,'' he
said, ''that Native Americans recognized the event as something unique and
significant and left us a record.''
Analysis of the Mimbres ceramic bowl
was made by Dr. Robbins and a graduate student, Russell B. Westmoreland, an
archeologist. It was found nearly 60 years ago by University of Minnesota archeologists
at Indian ruins near Silver City in southwestern New Mexico.
The Mimbres flourished from the 9th
century until the early 12th century. Radiocarbon dating and other analysis
showed the bowl was apparently produced at about the time of the Crab supernova,
scientists said.
Of the 800 ceramic pieces found in the
ruins, Dr. Robbins said, more than 200 were ''narrative'' bowls on which
drawings illustrated stories about hunting, fishing and the ''rabbit in the
moon.''
The supposed supernova depiction was
on a bowl customarily placed on a dead person just before burial.
''These people may have been the most
sophisticated astronomers in the Southwest,'' Dr. Robbins said.
He and Mr. Westmoreland noted that 23
rays extended from the stellar object at one of the rabbit's feet. Since the
number 23 seems to have had no significance in the culture, they speculated
that it stands for the 23 days the supernova was visible in daylight.
Among the celluloid dream girls
manufactured by Hollywood in the 1940s, Jennifer Jones occupies a celestial
niche. Beginning with her first major feature, ''The Song of Bernadette,'' in
which she played a saintly French peasant who has a vision of the Virgin Mary,
the character she represented on the screen was a spiritually exalted being who
kept part of herself in reserve. Even when Ms. Jones went notoriously down and
dirty to play Pearl Chavez, a sex-crazed half-Indian woman in ''Duel in the
Sun,'' right, you had the titillating sense of a lady playing a tramp. (The opposite
could be said of Lana Turner in dignified upscale roles.)
These polarities are suggested by the
title of the Film Society of Lincoln Center's retrospective of Ms. Jones's
movies, ''Saint and Sinner: The Tempestuous Career of Jennifer Jones,'' at the
Walter Reade Theater. Even as she crawled through the dirt, you still had a
sense of her as the abstract embodiment of ideal femininity, 1940s style: a
beautiful, empathetic trophy who was fundamentally untouchable.
Her aura of exaltation is largely
thanks to David O. Selznick, the producer who discovered her, fell in love with
her and eventually married her; for most of her career he micromanaged every
detail of her presentation. He liked to cast her as women from great
literature: the title character of Flaubert's ''Madame Bovary''; Carrie Meeber
in ''Sister Carrie''; Catherine Barkley in the disastrous 1957 remake of ''A
Farewell to Arms'' (not shown in the series); and Nicole Diver in F. Scott
Fitzgerald's ''Tender Is the Night.''
The retrospective begins on Friday
afternoon with the 1952 melodrama ''Ruby Gentry,'' set in Southern bayou
country, followed by the 1946 Ernst Lubitsch comedy, ''Cluny Brown,'' in which
she played opposite Charles Boyer, and ''Duel in the Sun,'' Selznick's pulpy
attempt in 1946 to duplicate the success of ''Gone With the Wind.''
But the most
blatant attempt to present Ms. Jones as the essence of female perfection is
''Portrait of Jennie,'' a romantic 1948 ghost story in which her dead
character, Jennie Appleton, materializes from the past to inspire a starving
artist (Joseph Cotten) who feels compelled to paint her. Jennie is the face in
the misty light.
The crook of your elbow is not just a plain patch of skin. It
is a piece of highly coveted real estate, a special ecosystem, a bountiful home
to no fewer than six tribes of bacteria. Even after you have washed the skin
clean, there are still one million bacteria in every square centimeter.
But panic not. These are not bad
bacteria. They are what biologists call commensals, creatures that eat at the
same table with people to everyone’s mutual benefit. Though they were not
invited to enjoy board and lodging in the skin of your inner elbow, they are
giving something of value in return. They are helping to moisturize the skin by
processing the raw fats it produces, says Julia A. Segre of the National Human
Genome Research Institute.
Dr. Segre and colleagues report their
discovery of the six tribes in a paper being published online on Friday in
Genome Research. The research is part of the human microbiome project,
microbiome meaning the entourage of all microbes that live in people.
The project is an ambitious
government-financed endeavor to catalog the typical bacterial colonies that
inhabit each niche in the human ecosystem.
The project is in its early stages but
has already established that the bacteria in the human microbiome collectively
possess at least 100 times as many genes as the mere 20,000 or so in the human
genome.
Since humans depend on their
microbiome for various essential services, including digestion, a person should
really be considered a superorganism, microbiologists assert, consisting of his
or her own cells and those of all the commensal bacteria. The bacterial cells
also outnumber human cells by 10 to 1, meaning that if cells could vote, people
would be a minority in their own body.
Dr. Segre reckons that there are at
least 20 different niches for bacteria, and maybe many more, on the human skin,
each with a characteristic set of favored commensals. The types of bacteria she
found in the inner elbow are quite different from those that another researcher
identified a few inches away, on the inner forearm. But each of the five people
Dr. Segre sampled harbored much the same set of bacteria, suggesting that this
set is specialized for the precise conditions of nutrients and moisture that
prevail in the human elbow.
Microbiologists believe that humans
and their commensal bacteria are continually adapting to one another
genetically. The precision of this mutual accommodation is indicated by the
presence of particular species of bacteria in different niches on the human
body, as Dr. Segre has found with denizens of the elbow.
Other researchers have found that most
gut bacteria belong to just 2 of the 70 known tribes of bacteria. The gut
bacteria perform vital services like breaking down complex sugars in the diet
and converting hydrogen, a byproduct of bacterial fermentation, to methane.
The nature of the gut tribes is
heavily influenced by diet, according to a research team led by Ruth E. Ley and
Dr. Jeffrey I. Gordon of the Washington University School of Medicine in St.
Louis. With the help of colleagues at the San Diego and St. Louis Zoos, Dr. Ley
and Dr. Gordon scanned the gut microbes in the feces of people and 59 other
species of mammal, including meat eaters, plant eaters and omnivores. Each of
the three groups has a distinctive set of bacteria, they report Friday in
Science, with the gut flora of people grouping with other omnivores.
Despite the vast changes that people
have made to their diet through cooking and agriculture, their gut bacteria
“don’t dramatically depart in composition from those of other omnivorous
primates,” Dr. Gordon said.
This new view of people as
superorganisms has emerged from the cheap methods of decoding DNA that are now
available. Previously it was hard to study bacteria without growing them up
into large colonies. But most bacteria are difficult to culture, so
microbiologists could see only a small fraction of those present. Analyzing the
total DNA in a microbial community sidesteps this problem and samples the genes
of all bacterial species that are present.
The goals of the human microbiome
project include analyzing the normal makeup of bacterial species in each niche
on the human body. “The focus in microbiology has been on pathogenic bacteria,
but we are trying to identify the commensal bacteria so that we can begin to
understand what proteins they make and how they contribute to our health,” Dr.
Segre said.
Another goal is to understand how
pathogenic bacteria manage to usurp power from the tribes of beneficial
commensals in the skin or gut, causing disease.
The lifetime of an individual
bacterium in the human superorganism may be short, since millions are shed each
day from the skin or gut. But the colonies may survive for a long time, cloning
themselves briskly to replace members that are sacrificed. Just where these
colonies come from and how long they last is not yet known. Dr. David A. Relman
of Stanford University has tracked the gut flora of infants and finds their
first colonists come from their mother. But after a few weeks, the babies
acquired distinctive individual sets of bacteria, all except a pair of twins
who had the same set. Dr. Relman said he was now trying to ascertain if the
first colonists remain with an individual for many years.
Taking a broad spectrum antibiotic
presumably wreaks devastation on one’s companion microbiome. If the microbiome
is essential to survival, it is perhaps surprising that the drugs do not make
more people ill. Dr. Relman said that perhaps there were subtle long-term
consequences that had not yet been identified. Much the same set of bacteria
recolonize the gut after a course of antibiotics, he said, suggesting that the
makeup of the colony is important and that the body has ways of reconstituting
it as before.
Born Golda Mabovitch, May 3, 1898 -
December 8, 1978, known as Golda Myerson from 1917-1956) was the fourth prime
minister, and a founder, of the State of Israel.
After serving as the Minister of
Labour and Foreign Minister, Golda Meir became Prime Minister of Israel on
March 17, 1969. She was described as the "Iron Lady" of Israeli
politics years before the epithet became associated with British prime
minister, Margaret Thatcher.David Ben-Gurion used to call her "the only
man in the government." Meir was Israel's first woman prime minister and
the third woman in the world to hold this office, but the first to do so
without a family member having been head of state or government
Meir was born as Golda Mabovitch
(Ukrainian: Голда Мабович) in Kiev in the Russian Empire
(today Ukraine), to Blume Naidtich and Moshe Mabovitch, a carpenter. Golda
wrote in her autobiography that her earliest memories were of her father
boarding up the front door in response to rumors of an imminent pogrom. She had
two sisters, Sheyna and Tzipke. Five other siblings died in childhood. Golda
was especially close to Sheyna. Moshe Mabovitch left for the United States in
1903 and the family followed in 1906. http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire.blog.ca
The family settled in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, where her father found a job as a carpenter and her mother ran a
grocery store. At the age of eight, she was already put in charge of watching
the store when her mother went to the market for supplies.
Golda attended the Fourth Street
School (now Golda Meir School) from 1906 to 1912. A leader early on, Golda
organized a fundraiser to pay for her classmates' textbooks. After forming the
American Young Sisters Society, she rented a hall and scheduled a public
meeting for the event. When she began school, she did not know English, but she
graduated as valedictorian of her class.
At 14, she went to North Division High
School and worked part-time. Her mother wanted her to leave school and marry,
but she rebelled. She bought a train ticket to Denver, Colorado, and went to
live with her married sister, Sheyna Korngold. The Korngolds held intellectual
evenings at their home where Meir was exposed to debates on Zionism,
literature, women's suffrage, trade unionism and more. In her autobiography,
she wrote: "To the extent that my own future convictions were shaped and
given form...those talk-filled nights in Denver played a considerable
role." In Denver, she also met Morris Meyerson, a sign painter, whom she
later married at the age of 19.
In 1913, Golda returned to her high
school in Milwaukee, graduating in 1915. While there, she became an active
member of Young Poalei Zion, which later became Habonim, the Labor Zionist
youth movement.. She spoke at public meetings, embraced Socialist Zionism and
hosted visitors from Palestine.
After graduating from the Milwaukee
State Normal School (a predecessor of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee),
she taught in public schools. She formally joined the Labour Zionist
Organization in 1915.
Golda and Morris married in 1917 and
began planning to make aliyah (immigration to the Land of Israel, then a part
of the Ottoman Empire). They made the move to Palestine in 1921, together with
Golda's sister Sheyna.
In Palestine, the couple decided to
join a kibbutz. Their first application, to Kibbutz Merhavia in the Jezreel
Valley, was rejected, but this decision was later overturned. Golda's duties
included picking almonds, planting trees, working in the chicken coops and
running the kitchen. Recognizing her leadership abilities, the kibbutz chose
her as its representative to the Histadrut, the General Federation of Labour.
In 1924, Golda and her husband left the kibbutz life and lived briefly in Tel
Aviv before settling in Jerusalem. There they had two children, a son Menahem
(born 1924) and a daughter Sarah (born 1926). In 1928, Golda was elected
secretary of Moetzet HaPoalot (Working Women's Council), which required her to
spend two years (1932-34) as an emissary in the United States. The children
went with her, but Morris stayed in Jerusalem. Morris and Golda grew apart but
never divorced. Morris died in 1951.
In 1934, when Meir returned from the
United States, she joined the Executive Committee of the Histadrut and moved up
the ranks to become head of its Political Department. This appointment was
important training for her future role in Israeli leadership.
In June 1946, the British cracked down
on the Zionist movement in Palestine, arresting many leaders of the Yishuv.
Meir took over as acting head of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency
during the incarceration of Moshe Sharett. Thus she became the principal
negotiator between the Jews in Palestine and the British Mandatory authorities.
After his release, Sharett went to the United States to attend talks on the UN
Partition Plan, leaving Meir to head the Political Department until the
establishment of the state in 1948.
On May 10, 1948, four days before the
official establishment of the state, Meir traveled to Amman disguised as an
Arab woman for a secret meeting with King Abdullah of TransJordan at which she
urged him not to join the other Arab countries in attacking the Jews. Abdullah
asked her not to hurry to proclaim a state. Golda, known for her acerbic wit,
replied: "We've been waiting for 2,000 years. Is that hurrying?"
Meir was one of twenty-four
signatories (two of them women) of the Israeli declaration of independence on
May 14, 1948. She later recalled, "After I signed, I cried. When I studied
American history as a schoolgirl and I read about those who signed the
Declaration of Independence, I couldn't imagine these were real people doing
something real. And there I was sitting down and signing a declaration of
establishment."
Israel was attacked the next day by
the joint armies of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, and Iraq in the Israeli
War of Independence. Armed with the first Israeli-issued passport,[9][10] Golda
was sent to the United States to raise money for the new state.
Upon returning from the United States,
Meir was appointed Israel's first ambassador to the Soviet Union. During her
brief stint there, which ended in 1949, she attended high holiday services at
the synagogue in Moscow, where she was mobbed by thousands of Russian Jews
chanting her name. Despite Stalin's repression of Jewish identity in the Soviet
Union, the turnout showed that the Jewish community was still strong and
united. The Israeli 10,000 shekel banknote issued in November 1984 bore a
portrait of Golda on one side and the image of the crowd that turned out to
cheer her in Moscow on the other.
In 1949, Meir was elected to the
Knesset as a member of Mapai and served continuously until 1974. From 1949 to
1956, she served as a Minister of Labor, introducing major housing and road
construction projects.
In 1956, she became Foreign Minister
under Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Her predecessor, Moshe Sharett, had
asked all members of the foreign service to Hebraicize their last names. Upon
her appointment as foreign minister, she shortened "Meyerson" to
"Meir," which means "illuminate."
As foreign minister, Meir promoted
ties with the newly-established states in Africa in an effort to gain allies in
the international community. But
she also believed that Israel had experience in nation-building that could be a
model for the Africans. In her autobiography, she wrote: "Like them, we
had shaken off foreign rule; like them, we had to learn for ourselves how to
reclaim the land, how to increase the yields of our crops, how to irrigate, how
to raise poultry, how to live together, and how to defend ourselves."
Israel could be a role model because it "had been forced to find solutions
to the kinds of problems that large, wealthy, powerful states had never
encountered."
In the early 1960s, Meir was diagnosed
with lymphoma. In January 1966, she retired from the Foreign Ministry, citing
exhaustion and ill health, but soon returned to public life as secretary
general of Mapai, supporting the prime minister, Levi Eshkol, in party
conflicts.
After Levi Eshkol's sudden death on
February 26, 1969, the party elected Meir as his successor. Meir came out of
retirement to take office on March 17, 1969, serving as prime minister until 1974.
Meir maintained the coalition government formed in 1967, after the Six Day War,
in which Mapai merged with two other parties (Rafi and Ahdut HaAvoda) to form
the Israel Labor party.
In 1969 and the early 1970s, Meir met
with many world leaders to promote her vision of peace in the Middle East,
including Richard Nixon (1969), Nicolae Ceausescu (1972) and Pope Paul VI
(1973). In 1973, she hosted the chancellor of West Germany, Willy Brandt in
Israel.
In August 1970, Meir accepted a U.S.
peace initiative that called for an end to the War of Attrition and an Israeli
pledge to withdraw to "secure and recognized boundaries" in the
framework of a comprehensive peace settlement. The Gahal party quit the
national unity government in protest, but Meir continued to lead the remaining
coalition.
In the wake of the Munich massacre at
the 1972 Summer Olympics, Meir appealed to the world to "save our citizens
and condemn the unspeakable criminal acts committed."[16] Outraged at the
lack of global action, she authorized the Mossad to hunt down and assassinate
the Black September and PFLP operatives who took part in the massacre[17] The
1986 TV film Sword of Gideon, based on the book Vengeance: The True Story of an
Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team by George Jonas, and Steven Spielberg's movie
Munich (2005) were loosely based on these events.
In the days leading up to the Yom
Kippur War, Israeli intelligence was not able to determine conclusively that an
attack was imminent. However, on October 5, 1973, Meir received official news
that Syrian forces were massing on the Golan heights. The prime minister was
alarmed by the reports, and felt that the situation reminded her of what
happened before the 1967 war. Her advisers, however, assured her not to worry,
saying that they would have adequate notice before a war broke out. http://louis1j1sheehan.us
This made sense at the time, since
after the 1967 war, most Israelis felt it unlikely that Arabs would attack
again. Consequently, although a resolution was passed granting her power to
demand a full-scale call-up of the military (instead of the typical cabinet
decision), Meir did not mobilize Israel's forces early. Soon, though, war
became very clear. Six hours before the outbreak of hostilities, Meir met with
Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan and general David Elazar. While Dayan continued
to argue that war was unlikely and thus was in favor of calling up the air
force and only two divisions, Elazar advocated launching a full-scale pre-emptive
strike on Syrian forces.
Meir sided with Dayan, citing Israel's
need for foreign aid. She believed that Israel could not depend on European
countries to supply Israel with military equipment and the only country that
might come to Israel's assistance was the United States. Fearing that the U.S.
would be wary of intervening if Israel were perceived as initiating the
hostilities, Meir decided against a pre-emptive strike. She made it a priority
to inform Washington of her decision. Then-U.S. Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger later confirmed Meir's assessment by stating that if Israel had
launched a pre-emptive strike, Israel would not have received "so much as
a nail."
In all likelihood, Meir's failure to
assemble the Israeli troops early on led to the initial Syrian and Egyptian
victories in the war. It proved extremely costly to Israel. Per capita, Israel
lost more forces in three weeks of fighting than the United States lost in
Vietnam in a decade. Meir's staff clouded her judgment and cost Israel hundred
of thousands of lives at the beginning of the war. However, Meir's decision
against a pre-emptive attack may have saved Israel. American support made
Israeli victory possible.[citation needed]
Following the Yom Kippur War, Meir's
government was plagued by in-fighting and questions over Israel's lack of
preparedness for the war. The Agranat Commission appointed to investigate the
war cleared her of direct responsibility, and her party won the elections in
December 1973, but she resigned on April 11, 1974, bowing to what she felt was
the "will of the people." Yitzhak Rabin succeeded her on June 3,
1974.
In 1975, Meir was awarded the Israel
Prize for her special contribution to the State of Israel.
On December 8, 1978, Golda Meir died
of cancer in Jerusalem at the age of 80. She was buried on Mount Herzl in
Jerusalem on December 12, 1978.
Golda Meir's story has been the
subject of many fictionalized portrayals over the years. In 1977, Anne Bancroft
played Meir in William Gibson's Broadway play Golda. Ingrid Bergman and the
Australian actress Judy Davis played Meir in the television film A Woman Called
Golda (1982), opposite Leonard Nimoy. In 2003, the American Jewish actress
Tovah Feldshuh portrayed her on Broadway in Golda's Balcony, Gibson's second
play about Meir's life. The one-woman show was controversial in its implication
that Meir considered using nuclear weapons during the Yom Kippur War. Valerie
Harper portrayed her in the touring company and in the film version of Golda's
Balcony.[citation needed] In 2005, actress Lynn Cohen portrayed Meir in Steven
Spielberg's film Munich.
* "The Muslims can fight and
lose, then come back and fight again. But Israel can only lose once."
* "There were no such thing as
Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a
Palestinian state? It was either southern Syria before the First World War, and
then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a
Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and
we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not
exist." (Sunday Times, June 15, 1969)
* "[The Arabs] will stop fighting us when
they love their children more than they hate [Jews]."
A Pentagon audit of $8.2 billion in
American taxpayer money spent by the United States Army on contractors in Iraq
has found that almost none of the payments followed federal rules and that in
some cases, contracts worth millions of dollars were paid for despite little or
no record of what, if anything, was received.
The audit also found a sometimes
stunning lack of accountability in the way the United States military spent
some $1.8 billion in seized or frozen Iraqi assets, which in the early phases
of the conflict were often doled out in stacks or pallets of cash. The audit
was released Thursday in tandem with a Congressional hearing on the payments.
In one case, according to documents
displayed by Pentagon auditors at the hearing before the House Committee on
Oversight and Government Reform, a cash payment of $320.8 million in Iraqi
money was authorized on the basis of a single signature and the words “Iraqi
Salary Payment” on an invoice. In another, $11.1 million of taxpayer money was
paid to IAP, an American contractor, on the basis of a voucher with no
indication of what was delivered.
Mary L. Ugone, the Pentagon’s deputy
inspector general for auditing, told members of the committee that the absence
of anything beyond a voucher meant that “we were giving or providing a payment
without any basis for the payment.”
“We don’t know what we got,” Ms. Ugone
said in response to questions by the committee chairman, Henry A. Waxman,
Democrat of California.
The new report is especially
significant because while other federal auditors have severely criticized the
way the United States has handled payments to contractors in Iraq, this is the
first time that the Pentagon itself has acknowledged the mismanagement on
anything resembling this scale.
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